


The pastry chef's son and the madhouse

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [2]
Category: Glee
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 20:12:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16919616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: Leo is in Italy with his family (and Blaine) for the summer. Being alone and not speaking the language, he befriended the only kid there who can barely speak English and communicate with him, Elia. One day, seeing him extremely bored, Elia proposes to him to go visit an abandoned mental asylum nearby. Later on, finding himself in an impossible situation, Leo will be forced to call Blaine for help.





	The pastry chef's son and the madhouse

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LDF's first Dies Scribendi.

Leo loves a lot of things, but traveling is not exactly one of those. He doesn't dislike it – as it apparently would be a sin – but he doesn't really see the appeal to it, at least not when the destination of the journey is not exciting enough to justify a transoceanic flight. As almost any American fourteen year old boy of his generation, he has anything he truly needs nearby – a Starbucks, a pizza place and a living room with a TV connected to the internet – and he is growing up in the conviction that everything that is worth seeing can be seen through a computer screen. 

It's not surprising that he wasn't happy when his fathers told him they were going to a very small town in Tuscany, Italy for a whole month. As expected, Kurt acted dramatically betrayed by his son's total lack of enthusiasm at the news. So typical of his father to decide something without consulting him at all, establish from the outset what reaction he was going to get and then play the victim when it didn't go his way. Everything in the house must run like a Broadway show with him, always.

Leo even tried to get himself out of it by being reasonable, for once. First, he said he would have rather stayed behind and spent time with his best friend. Usually right after the end of the school, Adam resumes his summer job – He had delivered papers up until he was twelve and he has been a busboy for the local convenience store for the past two years – and he's still got to go to football practice, but without school, he's got more free time to hang out with Leo. Maybe Annie was going to be there too as her super rich family usually leaves for some exclusive resort all the way across the world in August. Angela, Adam's mother, would have been more than okay with keeping an eye on Leo. He could have gone and stayed at the Walkers and everything. A whole month of hanging out and playing video games with Adam would have beat Italy any time.

But his fathers said no, that this was a family vacation, so the whole family had to be there. So, Leo tried to convince Adam to come with them. Kurt had nothing against bringing him along – as Adam was indeed like family – and since they had rented a house, he could sleep in Leo's room. But Adam refused saying that he couldn't skip football practice or bail on Mr. Martinez – the owner of the convenience store – at the last minute. Leo knew that the real reason was that Adam was too proud to have a thousand dollars vacation bestowed upon him, but he couldn't really hold it against him, could he? So he eventually resigned to the idea of spending a month of his life alone in some out-of-time, vaguely medieval village lost somewhere across the ocean. 

Such idea would have been way easier to accept if one of two things had verified. One, if Kurt had booked their usual apartment in the same super fancy resort in Sardinia they have been going to for the past ten years or something. First, it's a resort – so it has all the modern comforts and it's more or less like being at home, but with the sea – and secondly, a lot of families go there every summer, so Leo actually knows other kids there, he sees them every year, he is somewhat friends with them, as much as you can be friends with someone you see thirty days a year and you don't exactly care for. Two, if the family vacation had been a _real_ family vacation, which means a vacation where only member of the family were present.

But Kurt thought it was time for a change – Sardinia is an extremely beautiful place, he said, but there are so many other places in Italy worth seeing, Leo! – and so he found this tiny village in Tuscany, whose name Leo can't honestly even pronounce, and decided that its only little church, its only two main streets and its quite frankly disappointing lacking of any sea, was their destination for this year's vacation. To make things worse, he included Blaine in the definition of family and the man, usually too busy glorifying his stupidly handsome face to care for anything else, decided to tag along.

Blaine is supposed to be a _family friend_ , but since Dave hates him, Leo finds him annoying and Kurt has been his boyfriend a long time ago and sure as hell is not treating him like a normal friend now, Leo is not sure whose family Blaine is _exactly_ friend of. Anyway, Leo finds his presence irritating and mildly confusing for reasons he doesn't really like to talk about, so having him around is not making this holiday any easier to bear. Even if Blaine doesn't stick around that much, truth be told.

They have been here two weeks already and Leo can swear he has never been so bored in his entire life. The place is really small – two streets with a crossroad, a police station, a tiny _piazza_ , as they call it, with a little church, not much more – and they don't even live there, but on a hill nearby in an old farm that's been repurposed as a villa. The internet connection is very weak and hiccups a lot – so playing video games is out of the question – and their house is _literally_ in the middle of nowhere. If he wants to elude his parents' presence and Kurt's suggestions of either driving around to other tiny villages or staying in and playing board games – and Leo really does want to elude both things – Leo has to walk twenty minutes down the hill every day to reach the village and some form of civilization.

In the group chat – that Annie properly re-titled _Leo's summer support group_ – his friends are trying to comfort him, but seeing pictures from home doesn't really help at all. Right now, as he's sitting on an uncomfortable iron bench in the main and only square, he's looking at a picture of Annie, sunbathing in her own garden. She's wearing a frilly pink bikini that leaves very little to the imagination and she's looking at the camera, showing how a strawberry smoothie has made her tongue bright red. She wrote: “As soon as you get back, we're having a pool party at my house, I promise” underneath it. Adam replied with: “Cover yourself FFS”, which makes Leo laugh. He can see him getting all panicked and flustered. Leo too feels a little embarrassed watching Annie's half naked body, but his first instinct is not to tell her to cover herself _at all_.

“Girlfriend?” 

Leo looks up from his phone to find Elia standing right in front of him. He's wearing a pair of jeans and a silly t-shirt with a fat crocodile on it, the very same he wore the day they met last week, which was the reason why Leo started to speak with him in the first place. That and the fact that he seems to be the only person in this place who speaks a little bit of English, however broken. Desperate to connect with anyone his age, Leo has seen Elia's presence like a gift from the heavens, really. It helps that the other kid is actually quite funny too. And that his parents own the local pastry shop, which has been Leo's only source of bliss since he arrived here. Italian cakes _can definitely_ cure both boredom and homesickness. 

“No, she's my friend Annie,” Leo explains.

“Oh, the famous Annie,” Elia smiles, showing a tiny gap between his two front teeth. Something subtle, but wide enough to give character to his mouth. He sits down next to him and nods towards the phone. “She's really hot. Do you have any more pictures?”

Leo can hear Adam's voice in his head screaming “Don't you dare showing any more pictures of Annie to this filthy stranger, Leo” and he almost chuckles, but he knows Annie wouldn't mind. In fact, she will be thrilled to know that a cute Italian boy asked for her pictures when he will tell her later. “I have tons of them. She's kind of a selfie-addict.”

He starts browsing through the photo gallery on his phone under Elia's eyes. Annie sends pictures of herself with basically every single one of her messages, as if she wanted to document her day-by-day life in pictures. Starting from January of this year, Leo has hundreds of her photos. Annie in her sparkly red dress on New Year's Eve. Annie with braids at the farmer's market. He and Annie making peace signs to Adam a few minutes before the _Agony in Bethlem_ 's concert in Cleveland, where Adam stubbornly refused to go. There are Adam's photo too, of course. Mostly taken by Leo or Annie, and all of them showing his irritating blonde perfection. “This is Adam, my best friend. I told you about him.”

“Almost every day, yes,” Elia mocks him. “Are the two of them together?”

Leo frowns at him. “No.”

“Are you and Adam together, then?” 

Leo frowns even more and scoffs. “No. Nobody is together with anybody else! What's wrong with you?!”  
“That's usually how it goes down in my school. Everybody is either with somebody or wants to be with somebody and I don't know any guy with a girl friend who wouldn't like to bang her,” he answers.

Leo shrugs, looking away. “Well, we don't work like that,” he says curtly. I've known them for ages, we're just friends.”

Elia raises both his hands, apologetically. “Alright, calm down. I didn't mean to offend you, I was just curious,” he says, chuckling. “And tell me, is everyone so beautiful in the United States or you've just been extremely lucky? I thought I wasn't supposed to believe everything I see on TV. Instead, you are in the glee club, your friend is blond, handsome and a quarterback, and your other friend is a model. I mean...”

Leo smirks. “You're forgetting the most important part.”

“Which is?”

“My father is the school football coach,” Leo says, counting on his fingers. “And my other father is a Broadway actor.”

“A freaking Broadway actor! Right!” Elia slams a hand on his leg. They both laugh. “Sure, you came out of a TV show, didn't you? So, what else is real? Do you really have lockers at school?”

“Of course,” Leo frowns, looking confused. “Don't you?”

“No, we bring books back and forth from home in our backpacks, like savages, can you believe it?” Elia chuckles. “What about the school dances?”

“We do have dances, but they are not as fancy as you see them on TV. And they're not this great thing either,” Leo explains. "I mean, they are, but not everybody is magically transformed into a princess or a prince just for the night. If you're ugly, you stay ugly. I promise you, there are ugly people at my school.”

Elia chuckles. “And why is homecoming so special?”

Leo shrugs. “Honestly? I have no idea. But I don't get half the things that get jocks excited. Sometimes Adam makes no sense at all. I just nod at him and then go to see whatever sports event he asks me to. Sport is his thing.”

“What's yours?”

Leo looks at him for a moment, but then he finds out he can't really bear the way Elia's looking at him. His gaze feels too honestly interested and too intense on him, so he looks down. “Uh, I like comics and video games. Books.”

“And singing?” Elia suggests. “You know, since you are in the glee club.”

Leo shrugs again. “I like it enough, I guess. But it's not my passion. It's something I do because I can and it gives me extra credits, that's all.”

“Let me hear something.”

Leo instantly thinks _no_. He's not usually that shy about singing – in fact he bursts out in songs every other day in the halls just to annoy Adam – and he knows he's good enough that he would look good in front of Elia, but he's embarrassed now and he hates that he doesn't know why. “Later, maybe,” he murmurs, annoyed. “Why don't we actually do something for once? How do young people survive in this godforsaken place where there's not even a cafeteria?”

Elia smirks in a way that makes Leo thinks he knows something he doesn't, which is irritating. Also, he seems totally unfazed by his cold refusal. In fact, very little seem to affect Elia at all. “Actually, I come here today with an offer you can't refuse,” he says, and he doesn't need to fake an Italian accent because his English is always heavily accented. 

“Uh, so aptly Italian,” Leo snorts. “I'm not sure I want to be involved with the Mafia.”

“That's racist!” Elia says, sounding anything but offended. “Not every Italian has connection with the Mafia. Now, the place I want to bring you to was at some point managed by the Mafia, but that's totally not the point.”

Leo chuckles. “Oh, is it not?”

“No,” Elia shakes his head with conviction. “Besides, it is owned by the town now, so it's okay.”

“Hmm. What place is it?”

Elia smiles again, excitedly. He has an insane penchant for big smiles and for gesturing – it looks like his mouth wouldn't work without him moving his hands too – so he's always in constant motion. “It's an abandoned madhouse. Cool as fuck. They say it's haunted. The best would be to go there by night, but it's big and dark enough to give you the chills in daylight too. What do you say?”

Leo is not a big fan of scary places, in fact he doesn't like them at all. Horror movies are not his thing, he is more of a science fiction, fantasy guy. He likes epic stories, adventures, space traveling, this kind of stuff. Two hours of jump scares and two weeks of consequent sleep deprivation are not exactly his idea of fun, but he doesn't want to look like a scaredy-cat – God, how much he _hates_ that word. Every time Blaine calls him that he wants to punch him in the face – so he says yes, of course. Besides, spending the rest of the day in a deserted piazza doing nothing seems equally dreadful.

*

It turns out the abandoned mental asylum is on another hill and they need a forty minutes hike to get there. Before leaving for the journey, they pass by Elia's house – which is above his parents' shop – to get some food supplies as they are going to have lunch there. His mother, a busty woman of forty with Elia's same black hair, insists on speaking to Leo in Italian the whole time he's in her house, and yet for some kind of miracle, Leo understands her. It must be the magic hand language.

It's about lunchtime when they get to the place, but Elia refuses to sit down and eat. “Let's get inside first,” he says, excited. “The old cafeteria on the second floor is still intact. We can have lunch in there. It will be cool.”

“If you say so,” Leo mumbles, following him inside.

According to Elia, the place dates back to the 1920s and it was originally a brick factory. A couple of years later the factory went bankrupt and was sold to a private citizen who turned it into a mental asylum. After that, it was closed and reopened several times due to a few deaths in unclear circumstances, and from 1925 to 1978 – when all mental institutions in Italy were closed down – it changed five different owners, almost one every five years, who all suffered a tragic death.

“Then, in 1978 the heir of the last owner, Duccio Pacini, sold it to the town, that promised to repurpose it again but of course it never did,” Elia explains as they walks around the perimeter of the building, looking for a way in. “The main gate is locked and it's impossible to climb, but there's a back gate that was used for the deliveries that's luckily always overlooked whenever they come here to secure the place.”

“Do you come here often?” Leo asks as he carefully walks over a bunch of debris. 

“Not as much I would like,” Elia answers. He stops in front of what looks like a wall covered in ivy and drops his backpack on the grass. “This place is really huge and I've only explored, like, a third of it. Last year I came here with my cousin to visit the west wing, but he took two steps in and he started to cry, so we had to leave. Maybe we can go there today. Are you going to cry too?”

Leo sighs. “I sure hope not,” he says, honestly.

Elia chuckles, moving away a curtain of ivy to reveal a smaller gate, half corroded by rust. “Here it is. Help me, it's a bit stuck.”

They both grab the bars and pull strongly at it a couple of times, until the gate opens with an ominous screech. They stand still for a whole minute, listening to the echo fading away and waiting to see if the sound has attracted someone. “There are houses around here,” Elia says, retrieving his backpack and leading the way through the gate. “They are not that close and they're mostly empty this time of year, but you never know.”

As they approach the house, Leo thinks that the idea of being in such a creepy place surrounded by empty far away houses doesn't reassure him at all. A tiny voice inside of him starts saying: _Nobody can hear you scream here_ , which is probably why his heart is beating like he's having a heart attack. Suddenly he realizes that he's in a foreign country, in a haunted place with a guy he barely knows, basically the plot of every single summer horror flick ever released in the past twenty years. In a desperate attempt to let his family find at least his body, he sends his location to Annie and Adam with the message: “I'm here. Remember me.” To which Adam promptly replies: “R U Drunk?”

“There are a lot of weird stories around this place,” Elia says, distracting him away from his phone as they walk down a long hall, only partially illuminated by a lone window at the end of it. The place is not completely dark because the light outside is seeping in from the rooms on the two sides of the hall, all of them without doors. But this weird twilight makes everything even creepier, as if every shadow could more probably hide something since everything else is light. “For example, in the early 30s, this was a criminal asylum and only violent weirdos were imprisoned here. Among them there was a guy from Rome, called Er Lama, which means The Blade, who had killed over twenty people by stabbing them in the head. According to the records, the man suffered from a cognitive development issue since birth, but he was a huge man with an unusual strength and he was said to fear nothing. He had faced anything, from the police to, apparently, even a bear and never blinked an eye. Then they put him in here.”

Elia shows him inside one of the room, which is fairly small with only a tiny window, almost a cut in the wall, very high from the ground. The floor is scattered with debris and there's a wooden chair in a corner and some sort of table with wheels, something that was probably used to bring food or medicine to the patients. It's not exactly scary in itself, but Leo feels like they shouldn't be here at all. “What was wrong with him? Except the homicidal part, I mean.”

“They put him in here, they locked the door and from the night after, the man started trembling and shaking, and then screaming and crying, he was so scared that he stopped sleeping and his whole body was so tense that anesthetics wouldn't work on him. At some point he started scratching furiously at the wall, as if trying to dig a hole in it to escape from his cell. Frantically, every day, all day, he would scratch at the wall with a spoon or his nails, all the while screaming and howling that _it_ was going to catch him and make him pay. He went on for days without sleeping or eating, and eventually he would have died because of that, but he ended up stabbing himself in the head with a knife he had stolen from an orderly, possibly to put an end to whatever was haunting him.”

Leo shivers. “How do you know this was his room?” He asks. “I mean, it was 1930.”

“Obviously, tons of people have slept here in the past century, but,” Elia pauses for effect and leads him to the far end wall, “first, I have all the old maps of the place. Secondly, there's this. It's been repainted at least ten times, but it's still here. Unnaturally clear, don't you think?”

On the wall, under the scratched surface of those ten hands of paint, there are long scraping marks, almost furiously carved into the concrete. If Leo concentrates enough, he can almost visualize the pieces of nails and bloody skin that must have stuck to it while the man was feverishly working at it. Leo must physically tear himself away from it as he's both drawn to and scared to death by it. “Okay, let's move on,” he says, clearing his throat and walking back to the hall, which is not that much reassuring anyway.

Elia doesn't mock him as he had expected him to. “It's creepy, isn't it?” He says, more excited than amused by Leo's clear uneasiness. “But there's more. Come on, follow me.”

Elia grabs his hand, as if to make sure he won't stay behind – as if he would stay here alone! – and drags him along to the end of the hall and to another one, until they reach a staircase. “There was one of those big, turn of the century staircases here, with the double set of stairs, the convoluted handrails and everything, but when they cut the building in half to make the woman ward out of this part, the staircase was cut too. This is what's left of it.”

It's not much, Leo thinks. Now half the handrail is gone and most of the stone steps are chipped, but it obviously must have been glorious once. Elia leads him upstairs by the hand, chatting non-stop about the changing the place underwent through the years. “This right here,” he finally says when they reach what could have been a common room or a lounge, “is a very special room, and also my favorite one. First of all, despite all the changes in the building's plan, this room has never been changed but only refurnished, because a clause in the original contract that was subsequently included in every other contract prevented the owner to touch it. In fact, according to that clause the room had to remain exactly as it was intended by the first owner and must always be dedicated to music.”

“To music?” Leo asks.

“Yes,” Elia nods. “So, pretty much every decade, whatever this place was, there has been a piano here. Even now!”

There is, in fact, a piano in the room. Not a real one, of course, but some writer came in here and drew a perfect reproduction of a grand piano on the wall, completed with a piano bench and music sheets along the walls. It's so well down that it looks like you could play it if you wanted to. “Wow,” Leo says, sincerely impressed.

“Nobody really knows why there was such a clause about music in the contract,” Elias goes on. “Legends say it's because music keeps at bay the demons that haunt the place, which would explain why almost all the people who died here in mysterious circumstances couldn't play a single note.”

“What?” Leo asks, turning around.

“Chiara Landi, Ugo Baldi, Gianni Gori,” Elia counts on his fingers, spitting out one name after the other as if it was a match line-up, “Isabella Neri, Aldo Cioni, Ada Berti, Lucia Corsi and a lot of others. All of them musically untrained. All of them dead in this room or in the near proximity without any logical explanation.”

“That's creepy,” Leo says, feeling the insane urge to take the door and run.

Elia stares at him for a very long time, in a way that is both unsettling and intriguing. Leo clears his throat and turns to look at the fake piano again. “You look paler,” Elia says.

“Maybe it's because sunlight can't touch my skin in here.”

“Or maybe you are scared,” Elia suggests, once again without the mean undertone that Leo would expect from him in his position. After all, he would have every right to mock him, he thinks.

“Maybe I am,” Leo confesses, looking up. The words roll out of his mouth without him noticing, which is evidence enough that he is in fact scared. He would never admit to that otherwise, would he?

Elia smiles and joins him next to the piano. “Do you know how to play?” He asks, softly.

“Unfortunately no, so I guess I'm doomed.”

Elia chuckles. “Fear not, I do,” he says and then proceeds to _play_ the piano on the wall, his fingers on the keyboard, humming the melody along. “But I'm afraid I'll need some help to be sure it works. Do you know this song?”

 _Behind Violent Skys_ by Monster Under The Bed seems pretty appropriate, and he's been singing it since its release six months ago. They're even trying to convince Mr. Schuester that they need to perform it at sectionals. So no, he doesn't know it. He owns it. And singing comes natural to him this time, maybe because it's nice to do it while Elia plays the wall for him. _Elia_ is nice as he plays the wall.

As a matter of fact, he takes out his phone and starts recording this weird jam session, he and Elia both performing in front of the camera for future reference. They're so caught in it that the police agents have to call them four times before they stop and realize they're not alone in the abandoned building anymore. And that the only door is blocked by the two men, so they can't run.

*

As Elia told him in the car, this is not the police but a form of Italian gendarmerie called _Carabinieri_ or something like that – as far as he understands, they are pretty much like the police, so Leo decided to call him police anyway – and that they are taking them to the police station only to scare them a little, which is working. Leo has never been arrested before in his life and he's not even sure how these things work on foreign soil. Do they put you in jail here even if you are a foreigner? Do they extradite you? Will they call the embassy? This whole situation is making him freak out.

The two police agents – a blond guy in his forty with a big mustache and a younger man with an undercut – have no idea how to communicate with him, they tried and they failed miserably, and they prevented Elia to translate for them as they are probably afraid of what he could tell him, so now nobody is paying attention to him and he can write another desperate message to his friends. “I've been arrested. Worst day ever.” To which both Annie and Adam answered simultaneously “Cool! You're a bad boy now!” and “I'm gonna kill you.”

It turns out the police station is a few feet away from the pastry shop of Elia's parents and the blond agent, named Marco, knows them very well. He makes them both sit down in front of his desk and this time he asks Elia to translate because he wants to lecture them. “You've been caught trespassing on private property, which would be a serious offense in itself. But in this case it was also dangerous, as that building is far from being secure. Anything could have happened to you. Only last month, part of the ceiling crumbled, destroying a couple of rooms. Think about walking in there while that happened,” he says, sighing and shaking his head. “You are not little kids anymore, you should understand that. Rules are there for a reason and it's in your best interest no to break them. Would you do that in your country, Leonard?”

There's a long pause between the man's question and his answer as he has to wait for the translation. He just barely caught his name, which sounded completely different the way the man said it. “No, sir,” he answers diligently. He doesn't know much about Italian police, but he knows what the American one would want to hear from him and they can't be that much different. “I would not. And I am really sorry that I've done it here. It was stupid of me. I sincerely apologize.”

“Good. Now, Elia, since I know you're a good kid, I will let this slide this time, but I can't let you leave here without telling your parents, so I'm going to call them.” Elia was clearly counting on getting away with it with a slap on his wrist because his face falls comically at the news. Leo would almost chuckle if agent Marco didn't push another phone towards him. “You call your parents too, Leonard. Tell them to come and pick you up.”

Leo instantly turns pale. He knows exactly what is going to happen if he calls his parents. He can see the scene unfolding before his very eyes as if it was already happening. Kurt will barge in, tears already in his eyes, probably a shawl on his shoulders, asking – no, demanding – with the voice of a 1800's Dickensian factory girl who just lost her older child to pneumonia and is about to lose her second one to police brutality, to see him and then proceed to make a dramatic and quite embarrassing scene. As for Dave, he will be very reasonable and calm, but he will still punish him for eternity, which is in no way better. Leo would prefer literally anything to either of those things. Luckily, since nobody in the police station speaks English, Leo is allowed to call his parents himself and avoid disaster. In the face of a life spent grounded in his room, he plays his only card and he calls Blaine.

*

Blaine is currently sunbathing by the poolside in the garden of a beautiful villa, whose owner he had the pleasure to meet and fuck the night before. He has no idea of what his name is – Antonio, maybe – but he knows that he's a great kisser, the proud owner of the finest Italian cock Blaine has ever seen and a very good laid. He had planned to leave first thing in the morning, but he stayed, had breakfast and another fuck. Now his remarkable host is having a shower and Blaine is considering waiting happy hour and have a nice _happy ending_ to this quite satisfying day before heading back to the house and prepare for his night out.

His phone rings when he's almost certain he will, in fact, have some kind of aperitif with his host. Or possibly _on_ his host as the man has gorgeous abs too. “Hello?” He answers, without bothering to look at the phone screen. He's so relaxed right now that he's even willing to let the world annoy him, temporarily.

“Hi, it's me.”

For a moment, Blaine doesn't recognize the young voice on the other side of the line. He even looks at the number, but it says unknown caller. “And you are?” He asks, frowning. He hears sighing, which instantly makes him understand who he's talking to because there's only one kid he knows that manages to put such mixture of disappointment, boredom and disgust in one single sigh. “Leo?”

“Yes,” Leo confirms, and then he sighs again, this time in resignation. Blaine can almost see him lower his shoulders. “I need help.”

Blaine smirks. “Oh my, has the world turned upside down, has the planet started spinning backwards, are the dogs mewling and the cats barking, for _you_ to ask _me_ for help?” He says nonchalantly as he nods towards his host, his perfectly drawn eyebrows barely moving over the line of his sunglasses.

“Jeez, stop, this is serious!” He says, all worked up already. “I've been arrested, sort of.”

Blaine doesn't panic. Mostly because Leo is not his son, but also because he knows the kid well enough to know that he's got a small fraction of that flair for the dramatic Kurt also has. These things are not always genetics. “What for? Soliciting?” He snorts.

“What?! No, you idiot!” Oh, how much Blaine loves to ruffle his feathers. It is so easy. “Trespassing.”

“Oh. Well, if you decided to dedicate yourself to a life of crime, that's a good start, I guess. A bit underwhelming if you ask me. But you are still fourteen, after all.”

Leo groans. “I'm starting to regret having called you.”

“I have a solution for that. Press the little red button and you will never hear my voice again,” Blaine says, cheerfully. “Ah, the wonders of modern technology.”

“I can't do that,” Leo says.

Blaine smirks even more, the man in front of him smiles back, thinking it's because he's a glorious sight in his swimsuit and Blaine lets him believe so. “Let me guess, you don't want to call Kurt because he would make a scene or Dave because he would probably kill you, so you called your only other option: me.”

“Yes.”

Blaine lowers his sunglasses to better appreciate the view of this wonderful man diving into the pool. “You are in luck today, I feel magnanimous. What do you need?”

“They are not charging me with anything, but they won't let me leave by myself. They said you have to come and pick me up,” Leo explains.

Blaine makes a face and actually groans. “When?”

“Right away, what do you think?” Leo snorts. “They told me to call my father and tell him I'm at the police station, so they expect him to show up pretty quickly.”

“Maybe I want to give you a lesson,” Blaine ponders. “You know, the whole _a night in jail will do him good_ kind of thing.”

“Well, they are not keeping me here overnight, so get moving,” Leo snaps. “Where are you, by the way? You didn't come back last night, did you?”

“What are you, my mother?” Blaine asks, casually waving at the Greek God in the swimming pool. “But if you want to know, I met a guy in a club and we ended up having se—“

“I _so_ don't care about it!” Leo cries out. “Just, please, come and pick me up, okay?”

There's such a tone of desperate resignation in his voice that Blaine comes close to feel tenderness. If he's honest with himself – and he always is – Blaine has no desire to leave this paradise on earth to go and rescue a dumb teenager from the police. But, said teenager is his best friend's son, so he can't really turn his back on him. Besides, said teenager also happens to have made his life impossible for the past two weeks, for reasons that he might suspect but is not quite sure about yet, and this could be the perfect opportunity to make him pay for all the unnecessary teenage angst he has unleashed upon him.

“Alright, Leonard,” he says, knowing very well that the kid hates his full name with a passion. “I will come and pick you up, but at one condition.”

“Which is?” Leo asks, suspicious.

“That you are polite to me,” Blaine explains. “Promise me that you will be civil around me and that you will refrain from making any snarky remark for the rest of this holiday.”

Leo groans, obviously unhappy. “This is coercion,” he protests. “And it also sounds creepy. I bet the police would find your request highly suspicious.”

Blaine smiles. “You can always call your parents.”

Leo groans. “Fine!” He gives in. “The police station is next to the pastry shop.”  
Blaine makes sure the kid can hear him laughing before hanging up.

*

By the time Blaine arrives at the police station, Elia's parents have already came and gone away with him. His father seemed pretty angry and his mother was clearly ashamed, but they kept very calm, apologized to the police agents for their son's behavior and then thanked them for not pressing charges. They were probably leaving the big scene for when they got home, but that was to be expected: there's only so much you can ask to a parent.

Elia asked him to call him later to tell him how it went. He knew Leo didn't call his parents and he was very curious about this mysterious friend he was able to call to save his ass. Said mysterious friend shows up wearing black pants, a petrol green shirt with a very deep V-neck and a black jacket, everything coming straight out from Armani's latest spring/summer collection. He looks nothing like a father, but Leo can't say out loud what exactly he looks like because that's an embarrassing, irritating thought he absolutely doesn't want to have.

“Good morning. My name is Blaine Anderson, I'm here to pick up Leonard,” he says as he enters the room and starts shaking hands left and right. Half confused by his English and half bedazzled by his appearance, the agents nod vaguely.

Agent Marco stands up and shakes his hand too, then he proceeds to explain him the situation in an English so bad that Leo is sure his ears are bleeding. He sees Blaine's perfect smile falter, but the man doesn't lose it. What he does, instead, is open his mouth to deliver a short but apparently perfect sentence in Italian. Probably shocked by being spoken to in his own language, Marco nods profusely and shows him Leo sitting on a chair a few feet away.

“Are you alright?” Blaine asks. Leo nods quickly. “Then get up and let's go before he asks me for i.d.”

Leo stands up quickly and when Blaine reaches out to grab his wrist, he simply lets him. “I didn't know you speak Italian”, it's the first thing he says once they're out of the police station and into the car Blaine's rented for the holidays.

“I don't. I only know that one sentence,” Blaine says, starting the engine.

Leo snorts. “What did you say?”

“ _Mi dispiace, agente. Non ricapiterà più_ ,” he repeats. “It means, I'm sorry, agent. It won't ever happen again. I had to learn it a few years back for an audition and never really used it because, as I was waiting for the answer, they picked me for another bigger play.”

“And you still remember it?” Leo says, impressed. “Good for you at your age.”

Blaine looks at him, frowning. “Careful, kid.” Leo chuckles, but he doesn't insist. “And put your seat belt on. I don't want to get a ticket because you've been raised by the wolves.”

“Speaking of them,” Leo says slowly as he buckles his seat belt. “Are you going to tell them?”

Blaine takes the steep road that leads to the rented farm and keeps his eyes firmly on it. “Are you going to act like an untrained monkey in human clothes around me?”

“No,” Leo mumbles.

Blaine smiles, glancing over at him. “Then your parents won't know it from me.”

*

“Are you sure you are okay with this, Blaine?” Kurt asks for the third time in twenty minutes. The idea of going out for dinner with Dave and leave Leo with Blaine for a couple of hours was his, but now he's not so sure about it. Maybe Blaine had no intention of spending the holidays babysitting his son.

“There is actually no need for him to stay,” Leo insists as he's been doing since Kurt proposed this arrangement. “I'm fourteen, I don't need a babysitter.”

“Well, honey, I'm not leaving you alone in this house,” Kurt says, softly. “It's too isolated and there's no alarm system.”

“So what is _he_ going to do if someone breaks in?” Leo asks. “Seduce him to death?”

“It might be an option,” Blaine smirks.

Dave sighs. “Please, don't make me punch you in the face, Anderson,” he says.  
He was already on the door, ready to drag his husband away and go have a nice dinner in a beautiful restaurant somewhere on a hill nearby, but he seems on the verge of reconsidering the whole night now.

“Kurt, please, don't worry, okay?” Blaine says, holding both Kurt's hands in his and triggering two different growling in doing so. “I'm happy to do it. We'll have a quite night in, just the two of us. It'll be fun. We'll be okay. And by the time you come back, he'll be already in bed.”

“I guess you're right,” Kurt says eventually with a tiny smile. “Thank you again, then. Do you have our numbers? Leo?”

“Yes, I do have your phone numbers, dad,” Leo sighs. “I've had them since forever. Please go, before it's time to go back to the United States.”

Eventually, he manages to close the door on Kurt and Dave. He turns around, leans against the door and sighs comically. “No wonder you're so sheltered,” Blaine comments nonchalantly. “Your father has some serious problems letting you go.”

“First, I'm not sheltered,” Leo says and, when Blaine raises an eyebrow, he adds, “I'm not! Second, everyone in his room and we don't say a word to each other 'till tomorrow? How does it sound?”

“Oh, I don't think so, kiddo,” Blaine smirks. “You promised me you are going to be polite to me and you won't be allowed to avoid the chance to show me. So, tonight you're going to make me dinner. Kurt says you make a mean carbonara and I can't wait to try it.”

“What?!” Leo says, shocked.

Blaine claps his hands twice. “Are you still here? Chop chop! All that pork jowls won't cut itself, boy!”

“You don't want me to be polite, you just want a slave!” Leo protests, aggressively wearing an apron.

“That reminds me, you dragged me away from a villa with an actual butler in it, so to make up for what I've lost, you can _serve_ me dinner too.”

“You know what!? You're way worse than being arrested!” Leo screams, stomping towards the kitchen.

“I'm also way better than a lot of other things, kid. Maybe you'll know that one day,” Blaine says, smirking. And for the first time Leo is happy to be in the kitchen, because Blaine can't see him blushing in there.


End file.
